Poem of the Fortnight: 'The Contented Whore'

This is the first of a series of fortnightly blog-posts exploring some of the most interesting and unusual poems that I (Rebekah King) have come across during my data-entry work for the DMI.

Having recently graduated with a master’s degree in English Literature 1550-1700, I’ve become involved in the DMI in the capacity of a foot soldier to the captain-of-the-regiment that is Carly is herself. Over the next few months, I’ll be helping to build the database that will form the foundation of the final DMI site, cataloguing each miscellany and all the individual poems therein.

I am hoping that these short blogs will not only entertain, but will offer an insight into some of the ways in which the DMI may be ultimately used to track a poem and its variants through the printed collections of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Firstly then, here is a pseudo-ballad recorded variously in the DMI as “Song LXVI”,  “Song 136”, “The Contented Mistress”, and “The Contented Whore”. I came across it whilst entering data for 'A collection of miscellany poems' by the poet Thomas Brown:

1.

To Charming Caelia’s arms I flew,

And there all night I feasted;

No God such transports ever knew,

Nor mortal ever tasted.

2.

Lost in the sweet tumultuous joy,

And pleas’d beyond expressing:

How can your Slave, my Fair, said I,

Reward so great a Blessing?

3.

The whole Creation’s wealth survey,

Thro both the Indies wander:

Ask what brib’d Senates give away,

And fighting Monarchs squander.

4.

The richest spoils of earth and air;

The rifled Ocean’s treasure;

‘Tis all too poor a bribe by far

To purchase so much pleasure.

5.

She blushing cry’d--- My Life, my Dear,

Since Caelia thus you fancy.

Give her, but ‘tis too much, I fear,

A Rundlet of right Nancy.

A ‘rundlet of right Nancy’ refers, in this context, to a barrel’s-worth of alcohol. I’m not entirely sure what kind. With his lofty proclamations answered in a bathetic request for drink, it seems that the muse of our would-be Astrophil is less than stellar after all. One wonders whether this is, in fact, the same all-too corporeal Celia of whom the narrator of Swift’s ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ speaks, lamenting in his ‘amorous fits’ that ‘Celia, Celia, Celia....’(best not to finish the rhyme, I think). Whoever she is, her ‘blessings’ come at a distressingly reasonable price. What’s a poor poet to do? It is almost as if these women aren’t interested in playing the courtly objects of idolatry in the first place. This is undoubtedly one of the more succinct and successful parodies of the highfalutin love-lyric that I have come across in the database so far.

What the DMI can tell us:

•  At the time of writing, the DMI claims that the poem appears in eight miscellanies, dating from between 1699 and 1756.
•  In 1699 the title is given as ‘The Contented Whore’, under which epithet it appears twice more before it becomes ‘Song LXVI’ in the 1729 miscellany of drinking songs 'The Triumphs of Bacchus: or, The Delights of the Bottle'.
• After that, the original title of the poem is lost but echoed again in 1735 when it is listed as ‘The contented Mistress’, the original ‘whore’ having been, perhaps, somewhat reformed in the intervening years.
• The first two appearances of the poem claim that it is a translation/adaptation of a work by Martial. These are also the only versions to attribute the English rendition to the poet Thomas Brown (bap. 1663, d. 1704). All subsequent miscellanies from 1727 onwards leave it anonymous or unattributed and remove all references to Martial, along with any Latin epigraphs.
• The DMI lists the main genres of the poem as ‘Imitation/translation/paraphrase’ and as a ‘Quatrain abab’.
• Its subject matter is listed as ‘Sex and bawdy humour’ as well as ‘Sex/relations between the sexes’, which, in this instance, seem to be more or less the same thing.

A note on themes and genres in the DMI: At present, the themes and genres of a poem are being chosen manually from a fixed list of prearranged options. Necessarily, these are somewhat limited and limiting, and require highly subjective decisions on the part of the junior researcher (i.e. me). Nevertheless, the broader categories into which we are placing each poem may well allow the user to appreciate its character and position within a literary context, and might even act as a kind of shorthand-blurb for each entry. Some of my subsequent blogs will investigate the issues arising from this more eccentric aspect of the data entry process.

Find it in the DMI:  http://dmi.gnostyx.com:8899/exist/rest/db/dmi/poems/poem_0007093.xml

Poem ID: 7093

For a more in-depth explanation of how the DMI works, see the FAQ page: http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org/faqs/